Unionization and Employment Behavior

NBER Working Paper No. 3180Issued in November 1989NBER Program(s):Labor Studies

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data to examine the employment consequences of unionization. The paper addresses this issue with a new British data set and shows that, even after the addition of a substantial set of control variables, there is a strong association between poor employment performance and the presence of trade unions. The union employment growth differential is estimated at approximately -3% per annum.